Search the web from the Address Bar

You can perform web searches right from the address bar. Just type in your search terms and hit Enter. Firefox will take you to the Google search results page. This article will show you how to customize this feature.

You can perform web searches right from the address bar. Just type in your search terms and hit Enter. Firefox will take you to your default search engine results page. This article will show you how to customize this feature.

Web search in the address bar

When you type in the location bar and press EnterReturn, Firefox takes you to the Google search results page (i.e. http://www.google.com/search?q=) for that search by default.

When you type keywords in the location bar (for example, Firefox or cats) and press EnterReturn, Firefox takes you to a secure Google search results page (i.e. https://www.google.com/search?q=) for that search by default.

To reset the Internet Keyword service to use a standard Google search, right-clickhold down the Ctrl key while you click on keyword.URL and select Reset.

Note: The default Google search is encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. Switching to another search provider removes this protection.

URL autocomplete

In addition to being able to do a web search, before you press EnterReturn Firefox will match URLs that you type to the URLs of websites that you've been to before. For example, if you type "moz" Firefox may autocomplete "mozilla.org" if you've been there before. Pressing EnterReturn in this case would take you directly to that address. For more info about the things that Firefox suggests as you type in the address bar, see Awesome Bar - Find your bookmarks, history and tabs when you type in the address bar.

Domain Guessing

If you enter an incomplete URL, Firefox can try to "fix up" the URL by adding a prefix, suffix, or both to what you type. For example, if you type www.microsoft in the Location Bar, Firefox will append .com to complete the URL. If you type mozilla.org, Firefox will prepend www. to complete the URL. This "guessing" is secondary to the web search in the address bar described above - it does not work unless the web search in the address bar is turned off.